Cloudyn helps you leverage recent Amazon EC2 release

Amazon EC2 latest release, on March 8, offers great savings opportunities for its cloud customers. We wanted to take the opportunity to answer a few questions in regards to this announcement and what it means in terms of leveraging the best cloud economics.

What is the Amazon EC2 release all about?

Last week, Amazon introduced 64-bit support on all instance types and a new Medium instance type (m1.medium), with 3.75 GB of memory (half of m1.large) and 1 virtual core with 2 EC2 compute units (again – half of m1.large). Full details at AWS.

How can these new options save me more money?

According to our findings, the Amazon EC2 Large instance type (m1.large) is most frequently used and often underutilized. However, until Amazon recent EC2 release, even when we detected that m1.large instances were underutilized we could not recommend downscaling for two reasons:

The m1.large was previously the smallest usable instance for 64-bit platforms. Although micro instances support 64-bit platforms, they may not be suitable for processing tasks requiring a sustainable CPU load, and their I/O is very low

There was no viable downscaling candidate for m1.large. c1.medium actually offered more CPU power then m1.large, but the difference in the operating memory between the systems (7.5 GB on m1.large vs. 1.7 GB on c1.medium) was too large for downscaling, and m1.small was too far away by any parameters.

With Amazon EC2 new 64-bit support option and the new convenient m1.medium instance type, the gap has been filled and Cloudyn can now safely recommend downscaling m1.large instances to m1.medium in cases of detected underutilization.

Cloudyn users are welcome to visit their dashboard and find relevant updated savings recommendations, and other cloud users are welcome to check out how much they can save by Starting our Free Trial.